Show HN: Create and collect forms directly from email

So, the purported benefits are that a) it's easier to create the form than other form creators and b) you'll get improved response rates because people fill out the form in-line and reply rather than clicking a link?

Marketing managers don't want to learn some type of special markdown, and I can't imagine they would ever prefer it to a nice WYSIWYG form creator like Wufoo or SurveyMonkey.

No one wants to try and figure out exactly where to click and put their "X" for each choice - that's a much more frustrating user experience than native form controls, even in a desktop browser. On a mobile device? Forget it, and don't forget that something like 30% of emails are opened and clicked on mobile devices.

Apparently Google Forms has a way of embedding native forms in emails, although I'm not sure how they do it:

http://www.gettingmoreawesome.com/2011/05/24/increase-survey...

Now that would actually improve response rates, and was what I was hoping to see here.

How do I check the formatting before it's sent? How do I add a company logo or change the styling (colors, fonts, etc.)? Do I have to go back and forth through email if corrections are necessary? How do I send out a test survey then delete the results from my data set so they aren't included with the real one? Can I track who failed to respond and needs a follow-up email?

I'm (unfortunately) the one who gets stuck creating and sending out surveys for my company whenever it's necessary, and those are just a few questions I have after glancing at your demo. Right now, I can't see any situation where this would be preferable to SurveyMonkey. It might be acceptable for a quick and dirty internal survey, but I couldn't consider sending a questionnaire to our vendors or clients without having full control over the format and styling. Either that or I'd need to see evidence that your final product will be professional looking -- including some screenshots of a finished survey would help with that.

Looks really good and I like that you don't have to create an account. I didn't run into any major issues. Just a few thoughts:

- I found the copy after "Try a demo" a bit confusing. I wasn't aware of the concept of creating the form by sending an email, so the first sentence didn't make much sense initially. Maybe make the "To get started, copy the example text below. " more prominent and break up the "We'll reply..." sentence into something shorter.

- Once I've created a form and go to the homepage, could you show a link to it on the homepage?

- When I got the email to fill out the form I wasn't sure if I was supposed to edit the quoted text (even though that's exactly what you were telling me to do). Maybe add a link to the web form just in case.

Keep up the good work!

Nice idea and congrats on shipping!

Just so you know, small typo on the "Collect data from replies" column: "That's availabe too!"

Feedback: I was confused by the demo. Just trying to help.

- Cool! Just send us an email to new@emailform.io with your form.

Is the form the text below?

- To get started with an example, copy the text below.

Once I copy it, is this what i send to you?

- We'll reply you with a private link to access your online form & database, so you can start sending out forms and collecting data.

We were looking for some kind of "posterous for forms", but couldn't really find anything, so we created this side project. You can create (web)forms with email, and collect data directly from replies to the form email you send out (so people don't have to click on a link to an external form).

Any feedback is welcome, especially on whether this is something others might find useful as well?

Looks really interesting, but I don't want to send all my emails through you.

I'd love to see something similar as a Python Library, though- It is unlikely to be competitive to your business, since the overlap between marketing guys who are going to pay you, and IT guys who would do it in Python are small ;)

I'd be happy to pay for a solution if you had one.

It would be cool if I could import an email list from a CSV, similar to how MailChimp does it. Including support to reference other things, such as name, would also be useful but CSV is a big one. I say this because I am almost always handed a CSV from the client when sending out a newsletter.

Looks good, just try to think about how to use this for lead generation purposes.

On the try a demo, it'd be nice if you could have an example email sent to your email address (maybe the form that appears when you click the button now, so that you can do a side-by-side comparison).

I am very impressed with how rapidly .io is becoming the cool new domain.

Hey guys, looks cool. I want to build an automated response email system for an entirely different purpose, and I'm wondering what technologies you're using. I've looked at Lamson a bit.

i just tried this. it worked very nicely.

but i'm someone who still reads email via a terminal program and composes the message in emacs.

so for someone like me, this works great (and i was impressed by the parsing - i didn't try to make your life easy, but you extracted exactly the right data).

but i am not sure i have many uses for it. i suspect people that do have uses also care about branding crap, html mess and the like... but, again, for me, it rocks.

i used Google Sites and Google Forms mainly to collect the data of my customer. If this form can be integrated to both would be nice